Fourth grade students were introduced to the art career of a character developer. We looked at the animated show Thundercats and discussed how animators combined human and animal traits in order to create a new character/specie.

This project scaffolded upon the skills the students learned the previous year in third grade, when they painted self portraits. We looked in the mirror and sketched our faces, noticing the shapes we saw in our faces are the proportions of the face, neck and shoulders. We then used oil pastels to create a rough draft of our animal/human hybrid alter ego.

After finalizing our design, we sketched our imaginative portraits using pencil and then used tempura paint to paint our final painting. We used large brushes to carefully paint in the large shapes, and then used small brushes with a variety of bristle shapes to create details. We also spoke extensively about color mixing and contrast, teaching students how to create vibrant, colorful paintings.